Academics

Experience a New Kind of Learning

Why are our majors

self-designed?

Antioch College recognizes that the future is intersectional, and that many disciplines and skills will need to be blended in creating solutions.

Built on four academic divisions — The Arts, Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences — the curriculum provides students with support and guidance to engage with issues and subjects in which they are most passionate while challenging them to develop habits of mind and practice to address the fundamental issues of the world.

Beyond the classroom, members of the community are also actively engaged in areas of practice that are at the center of the Antioch experience:

The practice of environmental sustainability provides students abundant opportunities to acquire and apply knowledge in service to the natural world, its ecosystems and all their members.

The practice of deliberative democracy, diversity and social justice affords Antioch students a real world laboratory where they might explore, develop and apply the principles of inclusive, democratic and just action and governance within the context of the College and its extended community.

The practice of creativity and story encourages the development and active use of skills, tools, knowledge, understanding and emotions that unleash our imagination to invent, solve, make and do, and, no less importantly, to place ourselves alongside others in the world through a range of narrative art forms and approaches.

The practice of wellbeing is very much about the development of meaningful, healthy inner and outer lives.

The practice of work, world and resilient community, expressed in the Cooperative Education Program, continues to transform the lives of successive generations of Antiochians, supporting their exposure to a range of jobs, their capacity to adapt to new conditions and cultures, and to better understand the evolving nature of work and the role it plays in the development of resilient individuals and their communities.

Our academic divisions will provide you with the resources and support you need to design a major that works for you.

Design your own degree and your path to achieving it

Students design their own pathways to the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees. In their second year, they enroll in a Design Your Degree course that helps them articulate their program vision, goals and course lists. Student degree plans can be focused around a single theme, or as multi-disciplinary as our courses and our faculty. All Antioch students continue to participate in the College’s signature Cooperative Education program, which includes periods of full-time work, research, or other off-campus experiential opportunities.

Degree Requirements

In a traditional college, students talk about “declaring” a major, usually by the end of their sophomore year. Your guided self-design process will help you affirm your vision and how to get there, and will be way more worthwhile.

General Education and the First Year

The College believes education is a process of helping each individual to develop in his or her own way to his or her utmost capacity. An independent liberal arts college originally founded in 1850, Antioch College is imbued with the spirit of the words of its first president, Horace Mann: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

The general education program includes courses in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences; English composition and math courses; and values-based courses such as required courses in diversity, sustainability, and the senior reflection paper.

Here are some courses that make up the core of the first year/general education experience.

ANTC 101, Antioch Commons

The world needs people like you who can engage in unconventional thinking. Here you will learn the Antiochian way of learning through exploration, participating in campus governance, serving, collaborating, and forging a better future together through the democratic process.

ANTC 102, Dialogue Across Difference

The cure for bigotry is not mere tolerance, it is the ability to understand others. In this course, you will learn how to engage in intercultural dialogue, how to conduct respectful discourse across race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and national origin.

ENG 105, English Composition

No matter what you want to become, you will need to know how to write in an authoritative, academic voice. This course will teach you general guidelines for how to put your ideas into writing so the stories you tell and the solutions you propose receive the respect they deserve.

ENG 251, Expository Writing

It will take more than proper spelling and grammar to persuade your audience that your words are important. This course will teach you research techniques to support your stories and ideas, and how you will need to adapt your writing technique to reach different audiences.

EXPR 145, Foundations of Community Action: Preparation for Cooperative Education

Cooperative Education, or “co-op”, is your opportunity to get off campus and put your passions, knowledge and skill to work. Yes, it’s a job, but also part of the Antioch College curriculum. We will prepare you to apply, interview and build relationships through this exciting experience.

Self-Designed Major

As they advance in their studies, students work with faculty advisors to devise self-designed majors. Coursework in the major builds upon students’ experiences in the general education curriculum while providing students with pathways to deepen their knowledge or further develop their passion in a particular area of study, and culminates in a Capstone Project in which students create and present original work based upon and inspired by their self-designed major.

Antioch faculty members regularly offer courses in the following areas:

Africana Studies

Analytical Writing

Anatomy

Asian American History

Asian and Asian American History

Borders & Borderlands

Biology

Botany

Chemistry

Cities, People, Institutions

Comic Arts

Community Organization and Advocacy

Comparative Philosophy

Creative Practice

Creative Writing

Drawing

Eastern Philosophy

Ecology

English Language and Literature

Environmental Science

Evolution

Expository Writing

French Language and Culture

Gender and Sexuality

General Biology

Genetics

History

Japanese Language and Culture

Language and Culture

Latin American History

Literature

LGBTQ Studies

Literary Theory

Literature and History

Literature and Social Justice

Mathematics

Media Arts

Molecular Cell Biology

Natural History

New Media

Organismal Biology

Painting

Performance

Philosophy

Physics

Physiology

Political Economy

Postcolonial Studies

Printmaking

Psychology

Race and Ethnicity

Statistics

Sculpture

Spanish Language and Culture

Sustainability

U.S. History

Visual Arts

Western Law and Justice

Work and Workplace Skills

World History

Writing

Yoga Teacher Training

Cooperative Education

Cooperative Education remains a central component of Antioch’s curriculum. Through Co-op, students spend at least 25 percent, and up to 33 percent, of their undergraduate education engaged in the kinds of full-time work, research, or self-directed enterprises that have earned Antioch students an international reputation for creativity, industriousness, and ingenuity . During co-operative education terms (listed as “work” in the table below), students earn 12 academic credits for their experiential education as they work full-time.

Students Have completed their co-ops throughout the United States and in the following countries:

Language and Culture

At Antioch, we believe the victories for humanity we seek require us to reach beyond ourselves and engage with others for global solutions. We’ve crafted a language and culture requirement that is proficiency based, not credit based. This means that each student must demonstrate that they can can communicate and cooperate with others in a second language.

Showing native speakers of another language that you can build on common ground with them and that you care about what’s important to them is a necessary step to working for a better world. This also improves skills of cultural awareness, communication, and engagement that will be useful to you wherever you might be.

Antioch College currently offers study opportunities in French, Japanese, and Spanish. All students are required, at a minimum, to achieve Novice-High oral proficiency in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) in a second language.

Students also have the option of pursuing more advanced language learning leading to a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree with a language focus. This program of study includes the completion of one language immersion Cooperative Education experience abroad.